SFI Supports BMP Manual to Restore American Chestnut

The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) has released an easy-to-read best management practices manual so landowners can help restore American chestnut trees.

The manual outlines best practices for planting and raising chestnut trees, including site preparation, fertilization, deer and pest management, identifying and treating diseases, and more. The goal of the guide is to help planters of all types significantly improve the success rate of their chestnut plantings.

"We will need to plant a lot of trees if we are to eventually restore the American chestnut to its former range," says TACF President and CEO Bryan J. Burhans. "The manual provides advice so landowners can work with us, and the SFI grant also lets us create a web-based database so volunteers and partners can track their progress."

The manual is part of a project funded through the SFI grant program, which led to the first plantings of some of the most advanced blight-resistant American chestnuts in the southeastern United States. Earlier this year, seedlings were planted on lands owned by SFI program participants MeadWestvaco and Georgia Pacific. Quality Deer Management Association and the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources also helped with the manual production.

The American chestnut once produced high-value wood products, such as furniture and rail ties, and was a valuable food source in the Appalachian hardwood forest ecosystem for a wide variety of wildlife from bears to birds. An estimated four billion trees were lost to an exotic, Asian, fungal disease (chestnut blight) during the first half of the 20th century.